Silent Party #4

Girl Talk's self-made iconography maps out a very different artistic terrain, one in which performance personalities are inseparable from market ideologies, production and distribution concerns are spoken of more often than artistic ones, and the differing valences attached to music genres come into sharper relief.

It wasn't especially noteworthy that Gregg Gillis decided to ape Radiohead and release the latest Girl Talk record, Feed the Animals, with a "you decide" payment scheme, but it did reveal that he gets a touch sensitive when people don't want to pay him for his music.I still don't know what sort of marketing strategy his exit poll for those who paid nothing for Animals came from: two of the survey choices were "I don't value music made from sampling" and "I don't believe in paying for music."

This seemingly minor incident made Gillis seem more human to me, and it spurred my interest in trying to get a handle on his artistic persona. He's a mashup DJ, sure, but there's more. In his 2006 interview with Pitchfork, Gillis gave me a head start: "I'm associated with the whole mashup movement, and it's too bad because I'm not a huge fan of them...I do like having a CD. It's the rock'n'roll fantasy to be able to make your own music and put it on a CD and have your name on it-- it's awesome." And, true to form, the act of DJing in the midst of sweaty kids wearing neon Ray-Ban knockoffs is only a short stop from grunge populist Eddie Vedder soaring into the arms of another group of sweaty kids with bootleg "Stickman" t-shirts. In one of its more lucid moments, the Hipster Runoff blog (the name is explanation enough) agrees with me (I think), referring to Gillis as an "alt-bro." I've not heard tell of any bromantic episodes occurring at Girl Talk shows, but the two do seem the perfect pair.

Gillis wants to be approached under a rock rubric, and I'll buy that, for the sake of argument. But right now, when music-related moral panics don't come from the PMRC but the RIAA, Gillis' self-made iconography maps out a very different artistic terrain, one in which performance personalities are inseparable from market ideologies, production and distribution concerns are spoken of more often than artistic ones, and the differing valences attached to music genres come into sharper relief.

You're reading Pitchfork, though, and generically speaking, Gillis isn't considered rock, or mash-up, or alt-bro, he's-- despite playing almost exclusively pop songs-- considered indie. Actually, he's something else; he's indie of indie. By making and choosing to release his music by rock rules (pressed on a CD with liner notes and individual track titles instead of, say, leaked as .rar files to blogs) Gillis is alienating himself from even the indiest of indie labels, none of which would deign to touch his stuff lest they face years of lawsuits.Animals and Night Ripper are inherently independent music by dint of their creation-- mp3s carefully tweaked but purposefully recognizable.Gillis is represented by Illegal Art, less a label than an activist political consortium with the Fair Use Doctrine as its founder and CEO.But while Girl Talk's music makes a political statement by virtue of Gillis' adherence to traditional modes of distribution and rock-star posing, he's not exactly in the same ballpark as one of his clearest predecessors (and current "label" mate) Steinski.Where Steve Stein recognized the agit-prop and pedagogical possibilities of his chosen art form with his "Lesson" series and later tracks like "It's Up to You (Television Mix)", the nearest Gillis gets to outright protest is much more attuned to the current moment of ironic protest against "pirates," like this faux-chiding of YouTube remixers who made videos for his music without permission.

The above is a definition of indie influenced by political economy, but as with any genre, there's more than one way to slice it. In accounts like Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, indie is a guiding aesthetic principle that encompasses a grassroots network of shows and zines, the sort of networked subcultures that have long existed in the DJ/club realms as well.In her still-current 1996 bookClub Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Sarah Thornton dissected the early-90s British rave subculture as an inverted, small-scale image of the mainstream against which the attendees defined themselves.Her book was quietly groundbreaking for raising the important point, so obvious now as to be a tenet, that exclusivity, secrecy, and novelty can be used like currency within music scenes.In that same interview Gillis elaborates a similar point: "There's always this attitude in underground music-- prejudice against liking something mainstream. It always exists and it always will so for Night Ripper to champion top 40 stuff on an underground level from a one man band flips the whole situation."

Although his music and shows are awash in similar signifiers, Gillis aims Girl Talk in exactly the opposite direction.This is not to say that attendees don't exhibit the same sorts of social strata-- no doubt they do, read that Hipster Runoff post for, I think, a better explanation-- but more to underscore the fact that Gillis is aiming for a more universal sort of appeal.

Gillis is far from a revolutionary, but he is representative of an emergent music culture where incessant hybridizations and unfettered access have led to genre considerations and subcultural identity meaning less than other sorts of affective associations we have with music. In a recent segment on NPR's Bryant Park Project, Fluxblog proprietor Matthew Perpetua likened Girl Talk to that most maligned of record spinners, the wedding DJ. Some might read that as a slight, but despite the fact that I have a hard time actually dancing to anything he creates, I think it's a productive model to use for Gillis. Unlike Ripper's use of "Holland, 1945"'s "2...1, 2, 3, 4" as bait for indie bluebloods, on Animals recognition is key, and not the type that requires trips to Wikipedia.Hell, a listener to current pop and classic rock radio would probably feel comfortable with about 85% of the new album.

It's specifically this sort of contrast between old and new that winds through Gillis' most inspired creations, but it also underscores the idea that, when all music is equally accessible, even the words "old" and "new" start to lose their potency. The best moments on both albums are those that capitalize on exactly what classic rock stations canonize, and which hip-hop and country, the default pop musics today, specialize in: nostalgia, wish fulfillment, and sentimentality for youth. Ripper's widely agreed upon highpoint, and one of my favorite music moments of the past few years, is Gillis' mashing of Notorious B.I.G.'s reflective verse from "Juicy" with the exquisite classic-rock melancholy of "Tiny Dancer". About 2:30 into the second track of Animals, he nearly tops even that, mixing Rod Stewart's still-wonderful "Young Turks" with Ahmad's shameless soft-R&B tearjerker "Back in the Day", in the process maximizing the effervescent aspirationalism of "young hearts beat free tonight" with the longing of "I remember way back when." Simultaneously, then, we get the naïvete of kids without a hope in the world looking forward, and the wistful remniscences of a young adult looking backward.It's a captivating aesthetic technique, and I wish it could be expanded into an entire song, album, or career.

But that's too much to ask of Gillis, in the same way that it's too much to expect most people poking around on YouTube to watch an entire video without clicking one or a dozen of the other options lined up on the right. Gillis, a pure product of the Web era of pop music, is not a patient artist, and thus his greatest strength is thus also his tragic flaw. The first seconds of Animals provides the best example.At the beginning of "Play Your Part (Pt. 1)", Gillis lays the bassline from the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" under Pimp C's lyric from "International Players Anthem (I Choose You)".Just as we settle in to the notion that this is a fantastically simple fusion, Gillis goes and chops in "Lovin'"'s screaming organ, for no reason other than as a segue to the next sample.The bassline could have easily ridden through the entire verse of the song, and the organ would make a great, triumphant switch for the chorus.But Gillis' M.O.-- his personality, even-- is defined by restless compression and maximalism.

As is so much else: In a recent Atlantic Monthlyarticle, Nicholas Carr lamented the way his long-held reading habits were being "rewired", and his attention span shortened, due to his immersion on the Web. It's not falling into a deterministic trap to think that human beings can invent technologies that come to regulate how we perform very familiar tasks. It's happened in pop, of course: Advances in microphone technology led to singers' abilities to sing closer to them, thus crooning; the jukebox (and DJ) focused attention on the record rather than the song; 74-minute CD capacities (a result of the Beethoven's 9th theory or not) leading to chunkier song lengths in the late 80s and early 90s, among many examples.

It's too early to speculate how the digital/infinite access era will shake out for the way music is created, but Girl Talk is the example I always give when friends or colleagues ask me to give them a synopsis of American music culture today. Music critics don't talk (and aren't given the space to talk, for the most part) as much about the content of music anymore as often as its means of production and distribution, and Girl Talk is a case study for the time-worn democratizing discourse of digital and Web, as well as the ever-shifting cultural and legal conversations about the limits and possibilities of creative activities more generally.

The most optimistic part of me hopes that by sheer virtue of his existence, Girl Talk will help, even accidentally, us look at songs in the way that literary critics at the turn of the 20th century started looking at books: as dialoguing with and more or less cataloguing past ideas, all the way down to their point of initial inspiration. This is what makes cultures continue, and it's a truism not just for music, but with speech and human behavior as well. Social beings, like the art they create, are aggregates of what we've seen, heard, and felt elsewhere, and through others. But when laws dictate which aspects are acceptable for appropriation and recontextualization is when matters get needlessly complicated (Devo, this goes for you, too), and when the development of culture gets hopelessly sidetracked by an understanding of god-given rights to property that dates to 1690 (see Sec. 38, first sentence).

My favorite music professor in college, in a tangent on the "He's So Fine"/"My Sweet Lord" lawsuit, effectively explained this frustrating contradiction when he said, and I paraphrase, "George Harrison can get sued for 'unconscious plagiarism' of a melody, but he can't sue Roger McGuinn for lifting his guitar style on A Hard Day's Night, or every kid who cut their hair along with him in the Sixties". What he was trying to impart then wasn't a wish for a litigious art culture, but the fact that once an idea is encoded in a certain manner, it can be treated like a text, hence "unconscious plagiarism."

Of course we don't call what Girl Talk does, or what any other musician who uses samples does, "plagiarism", because we don't consider the art as much as the commodity. We call it "theft" and "piracy". Gillis tweaks performance archetypes from rock and dance predecessors, but that's nothing compared to reworking without permission the actual recordings of the songs themselves, which have been effectively monetized and covered by strict laws for a century now. I, like many others, was a bit shocked and briefly heartened to read about Mike Doyle, an actual living, breathing Congressman from Gillis' hometown of Pittsburgh, who called Gillis a "local guy done good," and spoke on the record of his progressive understanding of what Gillis does, focusing on the creative, not the legal aspect: "I hope that everyone involved will take a step back and ask themselves if mash-ups and mixtapes are really different, or if it's the same as Paul McCartney admitting he nicked a Chuck Berry bass riff and used it on the Beatles hit 'I Saw Her Standing There'...I don't think Sir Paul asked permission to borrow that bass line. But every time I listen to that song, I'm a little better off for him having done so."

Don't get me wrong, Girl Talk is not the Beatles, and his simple, at times simplistic songs are not exactly changing the world (on Animals' "Roc Boys/Paranoid Android" mash, they're just annoying the world), but as a Patient Zero for an era when Congressional legislation can be a powerful creative tool, Gillis is a pirate DJ in an updated sense of the term. From this vantage, his live persona is no different than how he most likely appears when he's initially making his music: He's the guy in his underwear, illegally and blithely grazing others' hard drives for source material, trying to concoct some kind of future from the past and present.